A broadband radiation source device, including a fiber assembly having a plurality of optical fibers, each optical fiber being filled with a gas medium, wherein the broadband radiation source device is operable such that subsets of the optical fibers are independently selectable for receiving a beam of input radiation so as to generate a broadband output from only a subset of the plurality of optical fibers at any one time.

A microstructured optical fiber for generating supercontinuum light. The optical fiber includes a core and a cladding region surrounding the core. The optical fiber includes a first fiber length section, a second fiber length section as well as an intermediate fiber length section between said first and second fiber length sections. The first fiber length section has a core with a first characteristic core diameter larger than about 7 μm. The second fiber length section has a core with a second characteristic core diameter, smaller than said first characteristic core diameter. The intermediate length section of the optical fiber includes a core which is tapered from said first characteristic core diameter to the second characteristic core diameter over a tapered length. Also, a supercontinuum light source including an optical fiber and a pump light source.

An all solid hybrid waveguiding structure provides large mode area, acceptable losses of the desired core mode and very high losses of the undesired next higher order mode in the core. Embodiments of the waveguide include a hybrid of low index barriers providing confinement by total internal reflection, and further include high index rings that support guided modes only at effective indices different from that of the desired core mode.

A broadband source device configured for generating broadband radiation or white light output. The broadband source device includes a gas cell, and a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber at least partially enclosed within the gas cell. A gas mixture is within the gas cell and the hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. The gas mixture includes at least one Raman active molecular gas constituting more than 2% of the gas mixture, such that the broadband source device operates in a balanced Kerr-Raman nonlinear interaction regime.

An optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier includes first and second optical parametric amplifier stages that successively amplify a stretched signal beam. A pulsed laser provides a fundamental beam. The second amplifier stage is pumped by the full power of a second-harmonic beam that is generated from the fundamental beam. A residual fundamental beam is used to generate another second-harmonic beam that pumps the first amplifier stage.

An optical communication system is disclosed. The optical communication system may include a first fiber pump laser system having a first single mode (SM) fiber output configured to output a first pump laser radiation, a second fiber pump laser system having a second SM fiber output configured to output a second pump laser radiation, at least one combiner-splitter element configured to combine the first pump laser radiation and the second pump laser radiation and to transmit N portions of pump laser radiation, and N doped fiber amplifiers, where N is at least four, each doped fiber amplifier configured to receive one portion of the N portions of pump laser radiation and an input optical signal to be amplified, amplify the input optical signal into an amplified optical signal, and to transmit the amplified optical signal.

A broadband radiation source device, including a fiber assembly having a plurality of optical fibers, each optical fiber being filled with a gas medium, wherein the broadband radiation source device is operable such that subsets of the optical fibers are independently selectable for receiving a beam of input radiation so as to generate a broadband output from only a subset of the plurality of optical fibers at any one time.

A coherent anti-stokes Raman scattering apparatus for imaging a sample includes an optical output; an optical source arranged to generate a first optical signal at a first wavelength; and a nonlinear element arranged to receive the first optical signal, where the nonlinear element is arranged to cause the first optical signal to undergo four-wave mixing on transmission through the nonlinear element such that a second optical signal at a second wavelength and a third optical signal at a third wavelength are generated, wherein an optical signal pair including two of the first, second and third optical signals is provided to the optical output for imaging the sample.

A laser beam positioning system of a laser-based specimen processing system produces at beam positioner stage, from a fully fiber-coupled optics phased array laser beam steering system, a steered laser input beam. System directs beam through one or more other beam positioner stages to form a processing laser beam that processes target features of a workpiece mounted on a support.

A femtosecond laser multimodality molecular imaging system includes a near-infrared pulse generation device for providing near-infrared pulses with a central wavelength of 1010 nm to 1100 nm and a spectral width of less than 25 nm. The near-infrared pulses can excite an optical medium with strong nonlinearity to generate the femtosecond laser pulses with ultra-wide spectrum. A pulse measurement compression and control module measures and compensates the accumulated dispersion of the femtosecond laser pulses arriving at the tissue sample, so as to eliminate the “time domain broadening” effect as much as possible. The obtained shortest pulses can interact with the tissue sample to generate spectral signals from different modalities, thus providing a variety of nonlinear molecular image modalities.